Ah! Fast-paced, well written, exciting, and the supernatural to boot! How can you lose? Well-developed characeters, appealing hero. Never taks down to its audience -- actually it assumes that the reader is as clever as the hero. ( )

I usually love these two collaborators -- I can't get enough of the Edge Chronicles -- but this was pretty lame. I gave it to my fourth-grade neighbor to review for me before dinner. He had it about half-read in twenty minutes and abandoned it for the fifth Harry Potter. I should have done the same.

Barnaby Grimes is a tick-tock lad. He'll deliver any message for any client, anywhere, anytime. He's the fastest messenger around and he'll even climb on rooftops to deliver his messages on time.

One night, while Barnaby is traveling by rooftop, he is attacked by a huge wolf-like beast. When Barnaby's friend, Old Benjamin, disappears, Barnaby suspects the wolf had something to do with it and sets out to discover the truth, meeting a cast of strange characters along the way.

CURSE OF THE NIGHT WOLF is the first in the new BARNABY GRIMES series from the authors of THE EDGE CHRONICLES. The story combines mystery, history, horror, action-adventure, and the paranormal into a perfectly scary story for tweens. The black and white drawings add a chilling effect to the story. The characters are brilliantly drawn and the villain is perfectly evil.

Barnaby's story will continue in RETURN OF THE EMERALD SKULL, and from the preview in my copy of CURSE OF THE NIGHT WOLF, his adventures are going to get much scarier! ( )

Judith says:Set in Victorian England, Barnaby Grimes is a Tick Tock Lad. A messenger who is employed by various businesses to deliver messages to their clients.

In this first installment, Barnaby notices that one of his friends Old Benjamin has disappeared. One evening as he makes his way to one of his employers via the rooftops of London, Barnaby has a near fatal encounter with a huge, hairy beast. Barnaby barely manages to escape by knocking him through a glass roof into a vat of boiling glue. The beast is obviously dispatched, but Barnaby now promises he will find out what kind of creature this was and how it got up on the rooftops. Barnaby is also determined to get to the bottom of the disappearance of Old Benjamin.

Barnaby is a very resourceful lad, he could have been an excellent librarian, with wonderful research skills. With the help of one of his clients, Professor Pinkerton-Barnes, Barnaby pieces together this terrifying mystery and saves the lives of those that were being preyed upon by a madman.

I am looking forward to the next book. This is a good book for those mystery readers who are looking for something a little different. It is very entertaining, with wonderfully vivid descriptions and enough action to satisfy any reader. ( )

Wikipedia in English

BARNABY GRIMES IS a tick-tock lad, running errands in his city, day and night, and “highstacking” around the rooftops in search of new mysteries to solve. In this first adventure, Barnaby is attacked one night by an enormous dog and soon finds himself swept up in a world of crooked doctors, poor and ill-advised patients, strange tonics, and very expensive furs. . . .

Soon after Victorian messenger Barnaby Grimes is attacked by a huge beast while crossing London's rooftops, he becomes entangled in a mystery involving patent medicine, impoverished patients, and very expensive furs.